What does it mean to live ethically in our interconnected world? Author, activist, and philosopher Peter Singer argues that moral progress depends not on tradition or emotion, but on reason—and that each of us has the power to reduce suffering and improve lives through conscious choices that reduce ‘Speciesism.’
Singer’s perspective asks viewers to move beyond thought, asking them to act in alignment with their moral compasses.
This video Peter Singer: Animal suffering is human responsibility is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Our Universe, as we understood it, underwent a radical change at the end of the 20th century. We had long assumed — consistent with the evidence we had, mind you — that our Universe was taking part in a great cosmic race that began back at the start of the hot Big Bang. On the one hand, the Universe was born rapidly expanding, but on the other hand, the force of gravity worked to slow the expansion down and pull things back together. For most of the 20th century, the big question for cosmology was, “Which impulse will win out in the end: gravitation or expansion?” Then, in 1998, we got our shocking answer: it will expand forever, but that’s because there’s a new type of energy that we didn’t expect, dark energy.
In the time since, we’ve ruled out alternative explanations and measured dark energy’s properties very well, but many questions still remain. In particular, despite all the ways that our knowledge of cosmology has changed in the 21st century, we still don’t know what dark energy is, or what ... Continue Reading »
The English, like the Romans and Russians, once thought they were the descendants of the Trojans.
In his Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts the story of Brutus, son of Iulus (therefore grandson of Aeneas), who was banished from Alba Longa because a soothsayer had prophesied that he would kill his father and mother. Thus begins a kind of odyssey; Brutus survives the Sirens, fights against the Gauls, asks the goddess Artemis where he can end his wanderings and is ordered to land on an island to the west of Gaul, inhabited by giants. Brutus and his Trojans defeat the giants and found Britannia.
The story is obviously a fantasy; yet Britannia is still the female personification of the country today. She is a Roman goddess-like woman, armed with a trident, helmet and shield, flanked by a lion. And recently two films have welded the mythical birth of England to the last heroic acts of the Romans.
King Arthur, a film made in 2004, returns to the idea of Arthur being a commander of legions ... Continue Reading »
Longtime readers of The Nightcrawler may have noticed something shift in me about a year ago.
What began as a newsletter on long-term investing in the midst of the pandemic became something else… a deeper search into meaning. A quiet obsession with resilience. A fascination with real quality. Not just about compounding, but how to live long enough to see the exponential fruits of compounding itself.
The cause of this shift was deeply personal — and painful. A near-death experience cracked open my sense of time, space, and wonder.
Surviving my ordeal made me ask altogether new questions I couldn’t seem to ignore: What endures? What survives chaos? What lasts in a world that has become relentlessly focused the short-term?
That search continues — and it will soon be taking me around the world. To ancient forests. To thousand-year-old inns. To family businesses still thriving after 1,000 years. To conversations with craftsmen, CEOs, monks, and biologists.
I’m writing a book. It’s called OUTLAST. It’s a field guide to resilience: to building a life, a business, an investment strategy that can lead to exponential outcomes over ... Continue Reading »
What if the path out of overwhelm was less about doing more and more about doing less—intentionally? In a world saturated with distractions, decisions, and demands, the CIA’s covert approach to multitasking offers a surprising lesson for the rest of us.
Former spy Andrew Bustamante unpacks how operatives in high-risk, high-stakes environments manage overwhelming complexity—not through superhuman ability, but by mastering one surprisingly simple principle: do the next fastest thing.
This video The CIA method for making quick decisions under stress is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
When you wave at yourself in the mirror, your reflection waves back. But biologically, there are many ways it’s painfully obvious that your reflection is fundamentally different from you. When you raise your right hand, your reflection raises its left. If you were to examine your body with X-rays, you’d find your heart is in the center-left of your chest, but for your reflection, it’s in the center-right. When you close one eye, your reflection closes its other eye. And while most of us are largely left-right symmetric, any apparent differences will manifest in the completely opposite fashion for our mirror-image counterpart.
You might think this is only a property of macroscopic objects made out of large collections, or composites, of fundamental particles. As it turns out, however, the Universe is not symmetric at even an elementary level. If you allow an unstable particle to decay, you’ll discover many fundamental differences between the allowable decays in the Universe and the decays you’d observe in the mirror. Certain particles, like neutrinos, only have left-handed versions, while their antimatter counterparts, the antineutrinos, only ... Continue Reading »
We are taught how to see.
When a healthy child is born, their eyes go about things with genetic efficiency: blinking and blurry, but functional. A new world of color, shape, and depth overwhelms the eyes that have only ever been closed. These eyes are cameras on the world. They take a snapshot of whatever they’re offered and send it on to the brain. And this is where the real seeing happens.
Early in life, you absorb your native language. We give people and things names. That is mommy. This is an apple. Those are trees. We slice and sort the world with grammar. A tree’s roots will burrow into the ground all around it. It’s home to millions of microorganisms and hundreds of macro-ones. Blossom falls, water transpires, and vast networks of fungi will pulse messages between arboreal friends. Words, though, will abstract the tree. They’ll cut away the roots, disregard the organisms, and isolate their functions. Here we have a discrete, self-contained tree. We are taught to see only the tree.
For this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the ... Continue Reading »
The United States used to be a very different place not so long ago. When a new child was born and was first taken to the doctor, the doctor would talk the parents through a schedule of expected care for the first few months and years of the newborn’s life. That expected care included, importantly, a schedule for vaccines: a series of inoculations, given at pre-set times in a child’s development, that would protect them against diseases that had ravaged humanity for generations prior. This included protections against diseases such as:
polio,
smallpox,
measles,
rubella,
mumps,
diphtheria,
pertussis (whooping cough),
tetanus,
hepatitis,
typhoid,
rabies,
cholera,
cervical cancer,
bacterial meningitis,
as well as many more.
When a child is first born, their immune systems are very weak, and hence they are very susceptible to (and at risk of being killed or permanently disabled by) a variety of infectious diseases. Vaccines were the way to reduce both the risk of infection and the consequences of infection in all, including our most vulnerable (the very young, the elderly, and the immunocompromised), while simultaneously having a tremendous public health benefit. In fact, vaccines were rated the most effective public health measure ... Continue Reading »
The flame of passion becomes obvious to those who work closely with passionate people. When employees notice a founders’ passion, they themselves are more enthusiastic and energized at work and have greater clarity about their responsibilities and goals. And this passion pays. Founders who are passionate about developing organizations — who are excited about finding the right people to work for a business, persuading investors, and pushing employees and themselves to grow and improve the company — become more committed to their goals, and this, in turn, boosts venture performance measured in terms of employee and sales growth.
Passion invigorates us and gives us an extra boost of energy when the going gets tough on creative work. This fact is often translated into advice (or a directive!) to find your passion. Such advice seems reasonable; if we aspire to creativity, and passion helps it, then we have to find and follow our passion. Right?
The problem is that the idea of finding our passion implies that it is already there, part of us, although perhaps dormant so that we are not aware ... Continue Reading »
As a former associate partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers during Silicon Valley’s big shift, I witnessed the VC industry pivot from a proven forty-year playbook of managing risk to something much more aggressive: Get big fast. Don’t worry about profitability. Cash out and find another venture. After a while I grew tired of this model and wanted to find a better way to build companies: a way focused on long-term stability and steady growth, funded through profitability; a way in which leaders were committed to a purpose greater than personal wealth generation, to being people first, and making their companies endure. These companies are what I call “Evergreen.”
One of the champions of the Evergreen business model is CEO Lisa Ingram of fast-food hamburger chain White Castle. Before meeting her, I had no idea that White Castle was the first fast-food hamburger chain in the world. It had been founded by Lisa’s great grandfather Billy Ingram and his partner, Walter Anderson, in 1921—thirty-four years before McDonald’s and twenty-seven years before In-N-Out Burger.
As a West Coaster my whole life, I ... Continue Reading »
Our Universe, as we understood it, underwent a radical change at the end of the 20th century. We had long assumed — consistent with the evidence we had, mind you — that our Universe was taking part in a great cosmic race that began back at the start of the hot Big Bang. On the one hand, the Universe was born rapidly expanding, but on the other hand, the force of gravity worked to slow the expansion down and pull things back together. For most of the 20th century, the big question for cosmology was, “Which impulse will win out in the end: gravitation or expansion?” Then, in 1998, we got our shocking answer: it will expand forever, but that’s because there’s a new type of energy that we didn’t expect, dark energy.
In the time since, we’ve ruled out alternative explanations and measured dark energy’s properties very well, but many questions still remain. In particular, despite all the ways that our knowledge of cosmology has changed in the 21st century, we still don’t know what dark energy is, or what ... 
The English, like the Romans and Russians, once thought they were the descendants of the Trojans.
In his Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts the story of Brutus, son of Iulus (therefore grandson of Aeneas), who was banished from Alba Longa because a soothsayer had prophesied that he would kill his father and mother. Thus begins a kind of odyssey; Brutus survives the Sirens, fights against the Gauls, asks the goddess Artemis where he can end his wanderings and is ordered to land on an island to the west of Gaul, inhabited by giants. Brutus and his Trojans defeat the giants and found Britannia.
The story is obviously a fantasy; yet Britannia is still the female personification of the country today. She is a Roman goddess-like woman, armed with a trident, helmet and shield, flanked by a lion. And recently two films have welded the mythical birth of England to the last heroic acts of the Romans.
King Arthur, a film made in 2004, returns to the idea of Arthur being a commander of legions ... 
Longtime readers of The Nightcrawler may have noticed something shift in me about a year ago.
What began as a newsletter on long-term investing in the midst of the pandemic became something else… a deeper search into meaning. A quiet obsession with resilience. A fascination with real quality. Not just about compounding, but how to live long enough to see the exponential fruits of compounding itself.
The cause of this shift was deeply personal — and painful. A near-death experience cracked open my sense of time, space, and wonder.
Surviving my ordeal made me ask altogether new questions I couldn’t seem to ignore: What endures? What survives chaos? What lasts in a world that has become relentlessly focused the short-term?
That search continues — and it will soon be taking me around the world. To ancient forests. To thousand-year-old inns. To family businesses still thriving after 1,000 years. To conversations with craftsmen, CEOs, monks, and biologists.
I’m writing a book. It’s called OUTLAST. It’s a field guide to resilience: to building a life, a business, an investment strategy that can lead to exponential outcomes over ... 
When you wave at yourself in the mirror, your reflection waves back. But biologically, there are many ways it’s painfully obvious that your reflection is fundamentally different from you. When you raise your right hand, your reflection raises its left. If you were to examine your body with X-rays, you’d find your heart is in the center-left of your chest, but for your reflection, it’s in the center-right. When you close one eye, your reflection closes its other eye. And while most of us are largely left-right symmetric, any apparent differences will manifest in the completely opposite fashion for our mirror-image counterpart.
You might think this is only a property of macroscopic objects made out of large collections, or composites, of fundamental particles. As it turns out, however, the Universe is not symmetric at even an elementary level. If you allow an unstable particle to decay, you’ll discover many fundamental differences between the allowable decays in the Universe and the decays you’d observe in the mirror. Certain particles, like neutrinos, only have left-handed versions, while their antimatter counterparts, the antineutrinos, only ... 
We are taught how to see.
When a healthy child is born, their eyes go about things with genetic efficiency: blinking and blurry, but functional. A new world of color, shape, and depth overwhelms the eyes that have only ever been closed. These eyes are cameras on the world. They take a snapshot of whatever they’re offered and send it on to the brain. And this is where the real seeing happens.
Early in life, you absorb your native language. We give people and things names. That is mommy. This is an apple. Those are trees. We slice and sort the world with grammar. A tree’s roots will burrow into the ground all around it. It’s home to millions of microorganisms and hundreds of macro-ones. Blossom falls, water transpires, and vast networks of fungi will pulse messages between arboreal friends. Words, though, will abstract the tree. They’ll cut away the roots, disregard the organisms, and isolate their functions. Here we have a discrete, self-contained tree. We are taught to see only the tree.
For this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the ... 
The United States used to be a very different place not so long ago. When a new child was born and was first taken to the doctor, the doctor would talk the parents through a schedule of expected care for the first few months and years of the newborn’s life. That expected care included, importantly, a schedule for vaccines: a series of inoculations, given at pre-set times in a child’s development, that would protect them against diseases that had ravaged humanity for generations prior. This included protections against diseases such as:
polio,
smallpox,
measles,
rubella,
mumps,
diphtheria,
pertussis (whooping cough),
tetanus,
hepatitis,
typhoid,
rabies,
cholera,
cervical cancer,
bacterial meningitis,
as well as many more.
When a child is first born, their immune systems are very weak, and hence they are very susceptible to (and at risk of being killed or permanently disabled by) a variety of infectious diseases. Vaccines were the way to reduce both the risk of infection and the consequences of infection in all, including our most vulnerable (the very young, the elderly, and the immunocompromised), while simultaneously having a tremendous public health benefit. In fact, vaccines were rated the most effective public health measure ... 
The flame of passion becomes obvious to those who work closely with passionate people. When employees notice a founders’ passion, they themselves are more enthusiastic and energized at work and have greater clarity about their responsibilities and goals. And this passion pays. Founders who are passionate about developing organizations — who are excited about finding the right people to work for a business, persuading investors, and pushing employees and themselves to grow and improve the company — become more committed to their goals, and this, in turn, boosts venture performance measured in terms of employee and sales growth.
Passion invigorates us and gives us an extra boost of energy when the going gets tough on creative work. This fact is often translated into advice (or a directive!) to find your passion. Such advice seems reasonable; if we aspire to creativity, and passion helps it, then we have to find and follow our passion. Right?
The problem is that the idea of finding our passion implies that it is already there, part of us, although perhaps dormant so that we are not aware ... 
As a former associate partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers during Silicon Valley’s big shift, I witnessed the VC industry pivot from a proven forty-year playbook of managing risk to something much more aggressive: Get big fast. Don’t worry about profitability. Cash out and find another venture. After a while I grew tired of this model and wanted to find a better way to build companies: a way focused on long-term stability and steady growth, funded through profitability; a way in which leaders were committed to a purpose greater than personal wealth generation, to being people first, and making their companies endure. These companies are what I call “Evergreen.”
One of the champions of the Evergreen business model is CEO Lisa Ingram of fast-food hamburger chain White Castle. Before meeting her, I had no idea that White Castle was the first fast-food hamburger chain in the world. It had been founded by Lisa’s great grandfather Billy Ingram and his partner, Walter Anderson, in 1921—thirty-four years before McDonald’s and twenty-seven years before In-N-Out Burger.
As a West Coaster my whole life, I ...